Free Will and Determinism
How can you prove that you are free
to do what you want?
It’s all around us…
2
By the end of the year…
 Analysis of the film
 Reference to real life case studies
 Reference to range of scholars
 Presentation back to the group
 Activities
 1 activity for others to do when they watch
the film
 My activity for you when you watch the film
 Guess what…
3
4
Destiny and Fate
 Do you believe in
destiny?
 What are you destined
for?
Matrix
 Morpheus:

Do you believe in fate,
Neo?
 Neo:

No. ... I don’t like the
idea that I’m not in
control of my life.
Minority Report
 Do you have a choice?
 Are you bound by fate?
Fatalists
 The Greek Fatalists
believed that life was a
tragedy and were
helpless victims of
circumstance.
 Necessity and fate
controls our destinies.
Moral Responsibility
 You are accountable
for your actions.
 You can be praised for
“good” actions and
punished for “bad”
actions.
 If there is no freedom,
there can be no moral
accountability.

See Kant and Boethius
Differing View Points
 Hard Determinists
 Everything is determined.
 Libertarians
 Nothing is determined; we are free.
 Soft Determinists
 Some things are determined, but not reason.
Hard Determinism
 Hard Determinists
 Everything is
determined.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
 In the mind there is
no absolute or free
will; but the mind is
determined to wish
this or that by a
cause, which has also
been determined by
another cause, and
this last by another
cause, and so on to
infinity.
John Hospers
 There are internal forces
and external forces
which give us the
impression that we are
acting with free will.
 Action: I read Pride and
Prejudice.


External Force - I
have an exam on Pride
and Prejudice.
Internal Force - I saw
Pride and Prejudice on
TV.
 ‘It’s all a matter of luck’.
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
 Darrow’s defence of
two men on trial for
murder reduced their
sentence from death
to life.
 Punishment as
punishment is not
admissible unless the
offender has the free
will to select his
course.
Clarrence Darrow (1857-1938)
 What has this boy to
do with it? He was not
his own father; he was
not his own mother;
he was not his own
grandparents. All of
this was handed to
him. He did not
surround himself with
governesses and
wealth. He did not
make himself. And yet
he is to be compelled
to pay.
John B. Watson (1978-1958)
 Watson suggested that
behaviour can be
predicted and controlled.

Psychological
Behaviourism.
 If the universe is
determined, all
actions, ethical and
otherwise, are
controlled by prior
causes which are in
principle knowable.
 Nature and Nurture.
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
 Conducted
experiments with dogs
and bells.
 Simple behaviour
can be controlled by
conditioning.
 Sophisticated
behaviour is
controlled by
sophisticated
conditioning.
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990)
 Worked on operant
conditioning.
 This looked at
behaviour in terms of
psychological
responses to
external stimuli.
 The conclusions
showed that our
actions are
conditioned and that
we do not actually
have freedom.
Isaac Newton
 Determinism is based in
the Newtonian
paradigm that the
universe is governed by
immutable laws of
nature.

Like a watch!
 If the universe is not
mechanical, then the
principles of cause and
effect are
indeterminable.

This does not
necessarily imply
freedom.
John Locke (1632-1704)
 A man wakes up in a
locked room. He
decides to stay where
he is, not realising
that the door to the
room is locked. The
man thinks that he
has made a free
decision, but in reality
he has no choice.
John Locke (1632-1704)
 The causes of our
actions are so complex
that it appears that
we have freedom.
 In reality there is no
freedom.
 It’s like the weather
system; it appears
random but it is in
reality complex and
determinable.
Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron) d’Holbach
 You say that I feel free.
This is an illusion, which
may be compared to
that of the fly in the
fable, who, upon the
pole of a heavy carriage,
applauded himself for
directing its course. Man,
who thinks himself free,
is a fly who imagines he
has the power to move
the universe, while is
himself unknowingly
carried along by it.
Ted Honderich (1933-)
 If everything is
determined, then the
Empiricist conclusions is
accurate:





There is no self which
is the origin of your
actions.
The mind is a byproduct of brain
activity cause by psychneural events.
There is no moral
responsibility.
There is no Freedom.
There is no
soul/afterlife.
Libertarianism
 Libertarians
 Nothing is
determined; we are
free.
In response to Darrow
 Blaming external
forces for our actions
is regret.
 We may not “make
ourselves” but we do
“make our actions”.
 Human decisions and
choices cannot be
proven to all be
caused.
Peter Van Inwagen

Life is a journey:

Determinists claim that there
are no branches on the road.
There is only one set path for
each person.

Libertarians claim that there
are and we make choices.

It may seem as though we
had not choices, we made
decisions which brought us
here.
Werner Heisenberg

The Heisenberg
uncertainty principle.

We cannot know both the
location and momentum of
subatomic particles at the
same time.

We should appeal to
probabilities rather than
formulate general laws of
certainty.

The universe is in fact
unpredictable and
indeterminable.
Honderich’s criticism
 Heisenberg’s principle
applies only to
subatomic particles
and cannot refute
Newton’s mechanics.
 Quantum Mechanics
qualifies Newton’s
view and puts his
theories into a broader
context.
The Quantum contradiction
 Even if it were the
case that the universe
was indeterminable,
the opposite of
determinism would be
randomness.
 If the universe is
random, that does not
prove that we have
free will, only that our
actions cannot be
determined at all.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

Freedom is the goal and
measure of our lives.

From nothing, man makes
himself what he chooses.

It does not matter what a
man does with his freedom,
so long as he acts freely –
freedom is an end in itself.

To do otherwise is to conform
to the will of others; this is
to be guilty of mauvaise foi.

“To be free is to be
condemned to be free.”
Soft Determinism
 Soft Determinists
 Some things are
determined, but not
reason.
Steven Pinker
 Emotions have a
biological (and
evolutionary) basis.
 Man might be
predisposed to
violence, but reason
controls that
predisposition.
 A moral sense is innate
in us and ‘as real for us
as if it were decreed by
the Almighty or written
into the cosmos.’
Immanuel Kant
 Determinism applies
to everything which is
the object of
knowledge, but not
to acts of the will.
 There are two types of
reason:
 Pure (theoretical)
Reason
 Practical Reason
Kant’s Pure Reason
 This is how we
perceive the world and
how we explain it
scientifically.
 Pure reason observes
the determined
universe and so must
accept determinism
to some degree.
Kant’s Practical Reason

Practical reason concerns
actions, the will and the way
we see ourselves.

Freedom is a postulate of
practical reason.

Our own self-awareness,
without which the world
would not make sense to us,
forces on us the idea that
we are free.

We cannot abolish freedom
without ceasing to see
ourselves as the originator
of our actions.
Not a compromise
 Compatibilitism is a
position taken due to
the need to have
some accountability
and responsibility for
human behaviour.
 It is, as Kant puts it, a
postulate of Practical
Reason. We are selfaware thinking beings,
we require freedom.
Voltaire, ’Dictionaire
Philosophique’
 ’Pear trees cannot bear
bananas. The instincts of a
spaniel cannot be the
instincts of an ostrich.
Everything is planned,
connected, limited.’
Thomas Nagel,
’What does it all mean?’
 ’The sum total of a
person’s experiences,
desires and knowledge,
his hereditary constitution,
the social circumstances
and the nature of the
choice facing him,
together with other factors
that we may not know
about, all combine to
make a particular action in
the circumstances
inevitable.’
Predestination
 The Christian idea that
salvation and
damnation are
predetermined by God.
 This is not scriptural
dogma, it is based on
interpretation of
revelation.
Augustine of Hippo
 It is not by our own
merit that we achieve
salvation but through
the grace of God
which is freely given.
 Note God’s
intervention in the
ministries of Moses
and St Paul.
 This was contradicted
by Pelagius and he
was branded a heretic.
John Calvin (16th Century)
 Man’s nature is
ultimately sinful.
 It is only by God’s
intervention –
predetermined – that
we can gain salvation.
 It is God who
permits goodness
and badness; thus
we cannot be
punished or rewarded.
John Calvin (16th Century)
 …Eternal life is foreordained for some,
and eternal damnation
for others. Every man,
therefore, being
created for one of the
other of these ends,
we say, he is
predestined to life or
death.
- Institutes of the
Christian Religion Bk3
Ch21 s5